Tuesday, December 16, 2014

If you had any doubt that
the heart is just pump and muscle, consider Dick Cheney whose new heart has had
no impact on his twisted view of morality.Of course, it might just be that, in finding the replacement, his
doctors were able to locate a perfect match, a donor who had also thought
torture was both okay and justified.In
any event, the former Vice President has invented his own definition of
torture. “Torture is what the Al Qaeda terrorists did to 3,000 Americans on
9/11”, he
declared on Meet the Press. “There
is no comparison between that and what we did with respect to enhanced
interrogation.” Cheney is at total peace with himself, totally self-satisfied,
convinced he holds The Truth. And
so, he went on, “I would do it again in a minute”. I was thinking he probably meant in a
heartbeat, but maybe that’s too close to the chest.

The long delayed release
of the Senate committee’s executive summary came with a spirited floor
speech by the outgoing Intelligence Chair Diane Feinstein followed by a
passionate endorsement by John McCain.For all his hawkishness — never a war he doesn’t want to enter — the
senator from Arizona, unlike Cheney, knows something about torture and has
always been a vocal opponent.With that
notable exception, like everything in Washington these days, the reaction to
the report has been mostly along partisan lines.Republicans denounce it while Democrats
support it.Of course, the torture
carried out in dark places, however disturbing, is just a part of a more far
reaching problem that began with those 3,000 plus tragic deaths in 2011.We are a different place, as codified in the
regressive Patriot Act.Remember it had
bipartisan support at both its inception and renewal. The legislation gives broad license to excess from
detaining people and assuming their guilt before being charged (often holding
them in that limbo for years on end) to the NIA’s aggressive Orwellian
eavesdropping. And then there are the
drones that reign their terror on as many or more innocents as they do combatants,
“antiseptic” weapons that leave no powder marks on our fingers.

All of it makes us angry,
but not so angry that we have done very much, if anything, about it.Aside from paying lip service, if that, to
our repulsion, we are shockingly disengaged. With a voluntary military, we have no loved
one on the front line, no real skin in the game.We tell ourselves that this has nothing to do
with us, but everything to do with the Cheney’s of our world.Not everything and certainly not solely.The post 9/11 hysteria used to justify our
country’s “patriotic” actions was shared by the public.Just fix it, we said, and don’t bother us
with the gory details.Do whatever you
have to do.And we say amen to claims of
American exceptionalism never measuring them against our less than exceptional
and inconsistent actions.Our leaders
insisted on donning American flag pins, and we never called them out on their
obviously cheap patriotic theater.

The Senate report added
some new details to the torture story but let’s not pretend we were unaware of
what was afoot.The facts of
waterboarding et al were widely know and sanctimoniously denounced during
Bush’s first term.No one, not the
president, vice president, CIA director or countless legal counsels, ever paid
any price for what clearly was beyond the legal.More to the point, it is so contrary to what
we claim to be American ethics and tradition.Everyone, except the Cheney cohort, knows it is terribly wrong, but even
the president who ended the practice has effectually swept these bad deeds
under the rug.And again, let’s be
honest, that’s exactly where we wanted them, hoped they would stay.“Pardon us and remember your manners.We’re having dinner now — no talk of
politics, religion and certainly not the morality of torture.”Any way, we didn’t do that; it was the
government, the Blue Meanies outside our snug little submarine.Yes, and I have a bridge to sell you.

We justify what we’ve
done, or what others have done in our name, because we largely buy into the
idea that every threat to us, especially of Muslim origin, is existential, when
its not.This is not to diminish the
challenges of an ISIS, but despite whatever rhetoric and actions are directed
against us, we are not their primary targets. Their fight is within Islam and
for its domination.We are, as I wrote
in an earlier post, a convenient foil masking their singular agenda, to rule
not the world but Islam.Can we avoid
doing the self-destructive by imposing ourselves where we don’t belong?Apparently not, because the train on which
our policies ride has long left the station.We’re pulled along, including the president who promised and wanted out,
because it’s far easier to start hostilities than to stop them.War and conflict has a life of it’s own, like
that giant Space Odyssey
computer Hal who was intent on taking control, and almost did.Apparently
no one has the courage to stop this Hal, and no one — that’s all of us — is
honestly supporting such action.We were
scared of the consequences, imagined or real, just as we have been since Dick
Cheney et al warned us of terror and mushroom clouds.

I just wrote about racism
and protests that probably and sadly will run their course in an America that
is attention span poor.The Sunday talk
show a news focus on torture will abate.After all, important things like a new and sure to be unproductive
Congress will be taking hold in but a few weeks.Then there will be an endless presidential
race, who’s up and who is down, to distract us further, but probably not induce
us to vote.Ah vote.What a bother. Who wants to go on record in taking responsibility
for our actions, for what OUR country is doing, and for the moral lapse that is
our own.Yes, we may get the best
government that money can buy, but in our enabling silence and failure to vote
we also are getting the kind of government that we sadly deserve.

Sunday, December 14, 2014

…my kids
grew up not only with a black president but with a black secretary of State, a
black joint chief of staff, a black attorney general. Chris Rock

Some weeks back Barack
Obama handed out this year’s Presidential Medals of Freedom.It’s the highest civilian honor he can bestow.Most of the honorees stood before him as he
draped the medal around their necks, their faces beaming. Some were honored posthumously.Among those were James Chaney, Andrew Goodman
and Michael Schwerner, the young civil rights workers brutally murdered by the
Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi in 1964.It’s been fifty years.Martin
Luther King, Jr. has since become an icon, a national holiday celebrated in his
honor.An African American Attorney General
presides over the Justice Department.The son of a black Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother sits in the
Oval Office and presided over the ceremonies.And then there are Ferguson and Staten Island.Some things refuse to change.

The long history of
uneven treatment for people (especially men) of color is so well known that
repeating here is hardly necessary.Suffice it to say, we have the highest
incarceration rate in the world.While only 13% of our population, nearly 40%
of the imprisoned are black.Drivers of
color are more likely to be stopped, walkers frisked.Ferguson and Staten Island are not outliers,
just recent examples of a disgraceful and unending norm. Their only distinction
is that they happen to be the headline of the moment.While demonstrations, like the one held in DC
and the 25,000 who marched in New York the past Saturday, might continue for a
while, be sure this, like all of-the-moment stories, will fade to be replaced
by tomorrow’s headline.They may not be
totally forgotten, but will no longer “merit” media attention.Some things refuse to change.

Obama is moving into the
final leg of his presidency.He is our
first black chief executive and one has to wonder if we will have another,
certainly any time soon.When he raised
his right hand to take the oath we told ourselves the country and we had
changed.Right.Not only aren’t we living in a post racial
society, we are seeing the racial divide in much sharper relief than was the
case on January 19, 2009.Presidents,
unlike any other elected official, never recede from the front pages, from our
television sets or computer screens.There is no “out of sight, out of mind” because they are never out of
sight.And Obama’s presence has become a
lightening rod for many in the white community and, in a different way, for the
black community as well.For the first,
the president’s visage personifies shifting demographics that signal the old
order is slipping way, an assumed eternal control and domination crumbling
beneath their feet.For the second, is the
recognition that this singular achievement, however monumental, is not enough,
is no magic bullet. Despite all the progress,
their lives remain substantially unchanged.And that is a shared feeling that transcends race; part of what drove
this year’s election results.The
statistics looked better (employment numbers, housing prices, stock market) but
real life for many folks remains challenging — a sense of losing rather than
gaining ground.

Race or more broadly,
fear of “the other”, may be the single most important driving factor in current
politics.For sure it’s an over
simplification to say so, but Republicans have become the (largely white) party
of “our kind of people”, while Democrats stand for the “other”, those who
challenge “the cherished American way”.And this fear of the other, or more accurately challenge posed by
the other, is what so enraged Republicans about the president’s
executive order on immigration.Make no
mistake; immigration has become a largely racial issue — read dark skinned
Latinos.That the instrument of some
modest forward movement is a black man, the prototypical other, plays hugely in
the lawsuit initiated and led by former Confederate states.Let me put it differently.Do you really believe for a moment that there
would be such, or even any, outrage if the “undocumented” were white Canadians
coming from north of the border?I
don’t think so.

After all, Canadians are
people who look and act “just like us” and (unless they are from Quebec) speak
English as their native tongue. We wouldn’t
have to spend money on teaching them “our” language or acculturating them.They will fit right in, won’t threaten our neighborhoods
or way of life.They won’t be a burden
on taxpayers, on hard working Americans.Maybe they will compete for or take our jobs, but how will we even know
since they look and talk just like us?They are not that different than someone from Alabama who settles in New
York, or someone like me who now lives in North Carolina.We may all talk a little different, but in
the end we’re good blenders.You get the
point.

Four years after the
March on Washington and in the last days of his life, Spencer Tracy joined his
longtime love Katherine Hepburn in making, the 1967 filmGuess Who’s Coming to Dinner.In
it, the politically progressive Drayton’s confront their daughter Joanna’s
totally unexpected decision to marry John Prentice (Sidney Poitier), an African
American physician.The poor girl was
just following what her parents had taught her — living beyond racism.The pending merger of two families, one white
and one black, is played out at an awkward dinner. In the end — this is Hollywood after all —
both sets of parents, along with the Drayton’s black housekeeper, come to terms
with change and offer their blessing.The film is full of clichés including the wisdom of women over men (thank
you Ms. Hepburn and the wonderful Beah Richards) and the decider role of the men
(Tracy and Roy Glenn, Sr.). So what do you think?People on the Hill always complain that
President Obama doesn’t socialize with them.Wonder how many dinner invitations he got from those same folks in the
years before he became famous and was running for president?Right, again.

America is a land of
bubbles and fortresses.We live in
neighborhoods and Congressional districts with people just like us.We interact with the likeminded and generally
stay close to our tribe at dinnertime and everywhere else.For the most part we marry and build families
that mirror that bubble mentality.I
don’t say that judgmentally.But it does
reflect our mainstream American reality.Is it changing?Yes, but painfully
slowly.We’ve been nurtured to distance
ourselves from the other, however defined.The sad thing is that we’re paying a very high price for maintaining
that comfort level, those old ways.Just
look at our dysfunctional politics.

Chris Rock (on a
promotional tour) and Frank Rich met recently for a
conversation published in the current NY Magazine.It’s a wide ranging one that reminds us, if
we didn’t already know, that Rock is a man of great depth and insight with wide
ranging interests and knowledge.The
subject of race came up as they sat together in high up in New York’s Mandarin
Hotel.Rock, like any African American,
has faced racial prejudice, but he is hopeful.“Grown people”, he says, “people
over 30, they’re not changing. But
you’ve got kids growing up.I almost cry
every day. I drop my kids off and watch them in the school with all these
mostly white kids, and I got to tell you, I drill them every day: Did
anything happen today? Did anybody say anything? They look at me like I am
crazy.”So Rich asks, “And you think this change is generational?
That it has nothing to do with Obama?”“It’s partly generational”
answers Rock, “but it’s also my kids grew up not only with a black president
but with a black secretary of State, a black joint chief of staff, a black
attorney general. My children are going to be the first black children in the
history of America to actually have the benefit of the doubt of just being
moral, intelligent people.”

Of course
Chris Rock is probably right.There has
been huge progress and the young generation gives one great hope.I have been working of late with a start up
lab in neighboring Durham, helping young entrepreneurs clarify and sometime
create their brands.These are
impressive and open-minded people, curious women and men with talent, builders
of the new and interesting.Race doesn’t
enter the picture.I recently
encountered a group of third-year Naval Academy cadets, classmates of a good
friend’s son.They are equally
impressive, open-minded and interested in contributing to their world.Hopeful signs no doubt, but Ferguson, Staten
Island and the reaction to immigration reform are still with us.The older generation, carrying all the
baggage of what they have been so carefully taught, remains in control.The signs are that young people may not want
to follow their lead, indeed rejects their ways.Only time will tell.Maybe when they get their piece of the pie,
they too, will revert, will try to hold on.History and the present environment suggest that may well happen, that some
things refuse to change.Please, let me be
wrong.

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About Me

A branding consultant with decades of experience working with large global clients and brands, he now serves primarily young startup companies. Beginning his professional life as a rabbi of a large urban congregation, he has watched the numbers of the religiously unaffiliated grow in the years since leaving the pulpit. His book, Transcenders: Living beyond religion and the religion wars (available on Amazon) considers this phenomenon. Beyond his consulting practice Prinz spends much of his time writing, including this Blog. He posts to "Beyond All That" only when there is something to say that might add value to the conversation.